December 2007

the last person arguing uses many many words and yet keeps repeating the same disconnected logic. However I don’t blame him for this. I blame his world view. let me explain…

It is clear that the only objective thing is reason. Reason is more consistent and reliable than any authority figure including god, unless you define god purely as reason. The Bible says God ordered many races of people to be killed, and yet it is assumed by Christians that Hitler is bad (or at least that what he did was wrong). The “biblical objective” approach should cause a person to arrive at the conclusion that Hitler is good if your on his side and agree that god told you to kill people (just like the Canaanites), and that Hitler is bad if you are on the side of the Jews. What is wrong with the above? It lacks reason. Training people from the time that they are children that morals are a set of rules defined by the bible robs them of the ability to use moral logic. The result is evident in the Christians that you know (or at least in the ones that I know). They act continually morally inconsistent and I am not one to say that they are hypocrites because of it.

Unfortunately they just have been handicapped in the area of moral logic.

From my perspective, the problem with many religious moral systems is that they a) pretend to be complete (e.g., “Follow the 10 Commandments), b) still require explanation and analysis of moral situations (e.g., what does “do not murder” mean?), but c) ignore (b) because it essentially refutes (a). That leaves us with a population that believes it is moral because it is religious, but has no idea how to make moral decisions.

So far as God is concerned, a knowledgeable apologist can explain events in the Bible so that God is consistent. For example, they would likely say that God — as creator — has the moral right to destroy his creations, but that we as humans don’t have that right. They would also say that God has the right to assign humans the task of carrying out this destruction, but that humans can’t assign that task to themselves. This is actually perfectly reasonable (in a certain context), but it leads to a severe problem — how can we condemn someone who honestly believes that God wants them to kill another person? I’ve never gotten a really satisfactory answer to this question from a theist.